Category: Good Writing

So, Warren Won, and Weiss is Out

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Well, sort of.

He won’t be an Undersecretary of the Treasury, but he will be an adviser to the Treasury.

So, he will still be there, albeit without a budget or staff who report to him.

I suppose that this is as good as can be expected.

Over at Credit Slips, Adam Levitin, has a a very interesting perspective on the reactions to this development:

There’ve been a bunch of post-mortems of the Antonio Weiss nomination in the press the last few days (see, e.g., here, here, and here). When I read them I often feel like I’m reading a story about a kid who went to a fancy eastern boarding school, where he was head of the literary society, lettered in three sports, and did lots of charity work, but didn’t get into the Ivy League school where all of his family and family friends went. The result: shock and outrage that the kid was denied his birthright!

Being nominated for Undersecretary of the Treasury isn’t quite like getting into Harvard (or even Yale). Yet reading Weiss’s defenders’ (and their all-too-willing journalist abetters), one would think that’s the story. And that underscores precisely what the problem was with the Weiss nomination, and what Weiss’s defenders just don’t get (or want to admit they get): the assumption that Wall Street success entitles someone to an important policy position for which they have no apparent qualifications.

The problem with Antonio Weiss was never that he worked on Wall Street. It was that working on Wall Street was his only qualification (besides giving lots of political donations). ……… The problem was that Weiss’s Wall Street pedigree was that was touted as his only qualification (unless one counts bankrolling a little-read literary magazine), as if it should be self-evident that anyone C-suite type from Wall Street is qualified for any job at Treasury. ………

If one looks at the actual criticisms made of Weiss by his critics (as opposed to how they were characterized by his defendants), you’ll see that the core complaint is that Weiss lacked relevant qualifications for the particular position for which he was nominated. Doing international M&A had very little connection to the position for which he was nominated. Being a wealthy liberal donor with good connections shouldn’t result in an important policy position. ………

If Weiss had been the head of a Treasury desk or the head of compliance at a Wall Street bank or had some record of weighing in on policy issues, I don’t think you’d have seen the same pushback against his appointment. Yes, there are real concerns about intellectual capture at the Treasury and revolving door problems, but what it comes down to is that a Wall Street background alone should not block a nominee, but by the same token, a Wall Street background alone cannot be what qualifies a nominee.

The degree of self-entitlement that is felt by the movers and shakers in finance, and the degree to which this self-entitlement is blindly accepted by the “very serious people” in government who set our policy.

It explains why our financial policy is so f%$#ed up.

I Guess I Need to Invoke Bishop Shelby Spong Again

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I have quoted the controversial theologian’s question, “Has religion in general and Christianity in particular degenerated to the level that it has become little more than a veil under which anger can be legitimatized?” repeatedly.

Well, a poster child for using religion as a justification for hate and bigotry, one Jennifer LeClaire, is now wondering why Christians are turning away from the faith, but studiously ignores just how offensive she and her coreligionists can be.

Well over at Patheos, Hemant Mehta is having none of that:

Sometimes, Christian journalists miss the elephant in the room with their stories. Like this one in Charisma Magazine asking “Why Are So Many Christians Turning Into Atheists?”

 ………
Ah, yes… the End Times are near and we’re all just fulfilling biblical prophecy. Makes perfect sense.

 Here’s another thought.

 People are taking a look at certain brands of Christianity and realizing they want nothing whatsoever to do with it. And when they back away from one form of Christianity, they realize there’s no reason to stick with the other forms of it, either.

 For example, just look at a sampling of what LeClaire herself has written in the past couple of years:

Like I said, that’s just a sampling.

 There’s this anti-gay, anti-reality, anti-science, conspiratorial mindset that plagues conservative Christianity. Even progressive Christians are ashamed to share a label with that group, pushing some of them to shed the “Christian” label despite believing in Christ’s divinity.

 ………
 Really, we all owe Jennifer LeClaire a thank you for answering her own question.

 Why are so many Christians turning into atheists?

 Because of people like her.

To quote Abraham Lincoln, “I care not for a man’s religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.”

Ms. LeClaire, perhaps if you stopped proclaiming your Christianity, and started demonstrating your Christianity through good acts, people would stop being horrified what comes from your poison pen.

This is an Epic Take-Down

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Kirby Delauter, a member of the Frederick County Council, does not like being challenged by the press.

It appears that he particularly dislikes The Frederick News Post, which is why he demanded that they not mention his name.

Hilarity ensued:

Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter

 Frederick News-Post Editorial Board | Posted: Tuesday, January 6, 2015 12:30 am

Knowing Councilman Kirby Delauter as we do, we weren’t surprised that he threatened The Frederick News-Post with a lawsuit because we had, he says — and we’re not making this up — been putting Kirby Delauter’s name in the paper without Kirby Delauter’s authorization. Attorneys would be called, Kirby Delauter said.

 In fact, we spent quite some time laughing about it. Kirby Delauter, an elected official; Kirby Delauter, a public figure? Surely, Kirby Delauter can’t be serious? Kirby Delauter’s making a joke, right?

 Round about then, we wondered, if it’s not a joke, how should we now refer to Kirby Delauter if we can’t use his name (Kirby Delauter)? Could we get away with an entire editorial of nothing but “Kirby Delauter” repeated over and over again — Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter? OK, imagine we agreed because of temporary madness or something funny in the water that week, how would we reference “Kirby Delauter” and do our job as journalists without running afoul of our lack of authorization?

 Blanks? Sure, we sometimes use hyphens in the case of expletives. Perhaps we could do that: “K—- D——-.” Or, perhaps, “Councilman [Unauthorized].” We giggled a bit more than we should have when we came up with “the Councilman Formerly Known as Commissioner Kirby Delauter,” which doesn’t seem as funny written down in black and white and includes his name, which defeats the point. Maybe we should just put his initials, “KD,” with an asterisk to a footnote (KD*), or refer to him as GLAT, the acronym for his campaign: “Govern Like A Taxpayer.” We could even make it sound a little hip-hop with a well-placed hyphen: G-Lat. Speaking of, could we get away with “K-Del”? Or we could simply go with the Harry Potter-esque “He Who Shall Not be Named.” (Cue the lightning strike and peal of thunder.)

 Yet we could take the low road down even further and childishly mangle “Kirby Delauter” into references you, the reader, would still understand. “Sherbert Deluder,” say. Or “Derby Kelauter.” “Shirley Delaughter” (and don’t call me Shirley). We found a great automatic online anagrammer that generated all kinds of alternatives and could make it a challenge for our readers to decode each time we have to reference the councilman: “Rebuked artily.” That was a good one. “Bakery diluter” is just silly but does have a ring about it. “Keyed rural bit” was another that caught our eye as somewhat telling, because Kirby Delauter’s pretty keyed up. We’re sure there’s a joke in “Brutelike Yard” somewhere.

………

Actually, the irony here is that when they speak of calling him GLAT or KD, they are (likely inadvertently) making a Jewish joke:  GlatT is a level of Kosher status, and KD means Kosher Dairy, but I’m not sure that anyone got that on the editorial board.

This is a Meaningful Description of What is Wrong with Washington, DC Professional Football Franchise

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Sally Jenkins makes a very good point about what is wrong with Washington’s Football team, all while avoiding the use of the clearly racist franchise moniker, though whoever wrote the headline f%$#@ed that up.

The short form of her thesis is that a fish rots from the head, and given the truly pitiful performance of the team since his acquiring the team seems to confirm this thesis.

I will leave you with her last paragraph:

For too long, no one has trusted the basic setup of the organization. So many flatterers and yes men survive while the truth tellers get offed or ignored, and every three or four years everyone gets fired and the club starts from scratch again. Step one for Snyder is to identify some real leaders, not just enablers. And to convince them he’s not out to waste their best efforts and earning years.

She further suggests that, “Snyder would have to listen, really listen, to his staffers and his players. Not to his pets and his stars and top jersey sellers, either, but to those who he has often disregarded and disrespected, the rank and file who show up for work every day and manage to do a professional job in an unprofessional environment.”

I simply do not think that this is in Dan Snyder’s DNA. When he first bought the team, he fired everyone, including secretaries and the like.

Sh%$#ing on the little people who might actually know what is going on has been an essential part of his modus operandi since he took over the team.

He cannot solve the problem, because he is the problem.

If DC fans could stay away from games, not buy merchandise, and decrease his revenue to the point where the debt service would be greater than revenue, which Jenkins suggests as “Plan B”, it might get rid of him, and we might find some resolution regarding the teams ineptitude on and off the field.

Full disclosure: I am a fan of the team, and I have been since 1976.

String Theory Taken to Its Logical Conclusion

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Proponents of the controversial theory have taken to arguing that their theory is so elegant that it should require no experimental verification:

This year, debates in physics circles took a worrying turn. Faced with difficulties in applying fundamental theories to the observed Universe, some researchers called for a change in how theoretical physics is done. They began to argue — explicitly — that if a theory is sufficiently elegant and explanatory, it need not be tested experimentally, breaking with centuries of philosophical tradition of defining scientific knowledge as empirical. We disagree. As the philosopher of science Karl Popper argued: a theory must be falsifiable to be scientific.

I agree wholeheartedly.

BTW, that sound you hear is Richard Feynman spinning in his grave.

Chief among the ‘elegance will suffice’ advocates are some string theorists. Because string theory is supposedly the ‘only game in town’ capable of unifying the four fundamental forces, they believe that it must contain a grain of truth even though it relies on extra dimensions that we can never observe. Some cosmologists, too, are seeking to abandon experimental verification of grand hypotheses that invoke imperceptible domains such as the kaleidoscopic multiverse (comprising myriad universes), the ‘many worlds’ version of quantum reality (in which observations spawn parallel branches of reality) and pre-Big Bang concepts.

 These unprovable hypotheses are quite different from those that relate directly to the real world and that are testable through observations — such as the standard model of particle physics and the existence of dark matter and dark energy. As we see it, theoretical physics risks becoming a no-man’s-land between mathematics, physics and philosophy that does not truly meet the requirements of any.

My knowledge of string theory is minimal, coming from my (PhD in physics) brother who mocks it for its lack ability to make meaningful predictions. (There’s also the representation in pop culture in Big Bang Theory, but I do not take my lead from such)

On the other hand, I know bullsh%$ when I hear it, and the idea that an unprovable theory should be accepted on the basis of its aesthetics is definitely bovine scatology.

This is an indictment of those string theorists who are calling for its acceptance on pure faith, but it is more than that: It is a searing indictment of string theory by those who are its greatest proponents.

H/T DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

Quote of the Day

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If we render our torturers superior to the political institutions of the government, and if we render the police superior to the civil power of elected officials, then we essentially have empowered independent standing armies to conduct our wars and enforce our laws, and self-government descends into bloody farce.

—Charlie Pierce

He is taking about how our torturers and our police demand to operate with impunity.

What the Rude one Said

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Note to Cops: If You’re Gonna Be So Thin-Skinned, You Should Stop Killing People:

That’s Andrew Hawkins, a wide receiver for the Cleveland Browns. He wore that shirt while warming up for his team’s game against the Cincinnati Bengals on Sunay. As you can read, it calls for justice in the deaths of Tamir Rice, the 12 year-old who was shot to death by a Cleveland cop for holding a toy gun, and John Crawford, who was shot to death by a cop outside Dayton, Ohio, for the crime of holding a BB gun he had picked up while shopping in a Walmart. Both were killed within seconds of the arrival of the police, with no attempt to ascertain what was occurring. They are both awful situations that call for serious soul-searching by the police in Ohio, to hold the officers accountable in some way, to improve training so that such tragedies don’t happen again, to perhaps confront the racism that seems to heighten the violence in these situations. That would all be meaningful and sensitive.

But it’s so much easier to go batsh%$ and attack Hawkins.

Yeah, like teenaged girls who just saw that bitch Tanya wearing that purple dress on Instagram when she knew perfectly well that Alicia was gonna wear the same one to the dance (god, Tanya, you don’t even look good in purple), the Cleveland Police Patrolman’s Association stomped its feet and demanded an apology: “It’s pretty pathetic when athletes think they know the law. They should stick to what they know best on the field. The Cleveland police protect and serve the Browns stadium and the Browns organization owes us an apology.” You gotta love the implied threat there: “Mighty nice stadium you have here. Be a shame if we let your animal fans run wild.”

Read the rest of the Rude Pundit’s essay.

It is Impossible to Avoid the Conclusion that Black Lives Didn’t Matter Much at all to the Magazine.

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This is an Actual TNR Cover

In case you haven’t heard, there has been a kerfluffle at that bastion for white Ivy League affirmative action The New Republic, with the firing of  Franklin Foer as editor.

A significant portion of the deadwood on their masthead, along with other staff, resigned in protest.

While they consider it to be drawing an ethical line in the sand, it is, in fact, a mark of their missing ethics.

The fact that they were still on that masthead after years of racism and disregard for the minority community at TNR is how their stand should be viewed, as Ta-Nehisi Coates so ably states:

………

 Earlier this year, Foer edited an anthology of TNR writings titled Insurrections of the Mind, commemorating the magazine’s 100-year history. “This book hasn’t been compiled in the name of definitiveness,” Foer wrote. “It was put together in the spirit of the magazine that it anthologizes: it is an argument about what matters.” There is only one essay in Insurrections that takes race as its subject. The volume includes only one black writer and only two writers of color. This is not an oversight. Nor does it mean that Foer is a bad human. On the contrary, if one were to attempt to capture the “spirit” of TNR, it would be impossible to avoid the conclusion that black lives don’t matter much at all.

 That explains why the family rows at TNR’s virtual funeral look like the “Whites Only” section of a Jim Crow-era movie-house. For most of its modern history, TNR has been an entirely white publication, which published stories confirming white people’s worst instincts. During the culture wars of the ’80s and ’90s, TNR regarded black people with an attitude ranging from removed disregard to blatant bigotry. When people discuss TNR’s racism, Andrew Sullivan’s publication of excerpts from Charles Murray’s book The Bell Curve (and a series of dissents) gets the most attention. But this fuels the lie that one infamous issue stands apart. In fact, the Bell Curve episode is remarkable for how well it fits with the rest of TNR’s history.

(emphasis mine)

I just need to note here, as I always do, that, in his late teens, the co-author of The Bell Curve, Charles Murray, burned a cross next to the local police station.

This event in his early life provides necessary context for the fact that most of his professional career has been about putting an academic gloss on racism.

Coates makes the point that the genteel racism of the magazine is not limited to the actions, and tenure, of the contemptible Marty Peretz:

Two years later, Washington Post writer Richard Cohen was roundly rebuked for advocating that D.C. jewelry stores discriminate against young black men—but not by TNR. The magazine took the opportunity to convene a panel to “reflect briefly” on whether it was moral for merchants to bar black men from their stores. (“Expecting a jewelry store owner to risk his life in the service of color-blind justice is expecting too much,” the magazine concluded.)

 TNR made a habit of “reflecting briefly” on matters that were life and death to black people but were mostly abstract thought experiments to the magazine’s editors. Before, during, and after Sullivan’s tenure, the magazine seemed to believe that the kind of racism that mattered most was best evidenced in the evils of Afrocentrism, the excesses of multiculturalism, and the machinations of Jesse Jackson. It’s true that TNR’s staff roundly objected to excerpting The Bell Curve, but I was never quite sure why. Sullivan was simply exposing the dark premise that lay beneath much of the magazine’s coverage of America’s ancient dilemma.

Read the rest.

BTW, after you read this, you might want to read Wonkette’s Rebecca Schoenkopf’s take on this.

While Coates’ analysis is trenchant and thoughtful, Wonkette is just delightfully snarky and very funny.

And Here is a Part of the Solution to Law Enforcement Impunity

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Here is a fascinating concept.

Given that police misconduct costs taxpayers millions of dollars, and a small percentage of the police are responsible for the bulk of these costs, how about requiring police officers to carry their own liability insurance, just as doctors are:

In almost every city across the US, tax dollars are used to cover the damages and settlements from lawsuits filed against their police departments due to officer misconduct. Taxpayers in essence pay out massive amounts in damages for officers not doing their job properly. Additionally, the cost is compounded because taxpayers are forced to continue paying the salaries of these criminal cops.

 City officials don’t have the guts to hold officers accountable for their actions. So a new approach is necessary to hold rogue officers responsible for their conduct.

 Just like doctors have to carry malpractice insurance, police officers should be required to carry professional liability insurance as a condition of employment.

 ………

 Similarly to how other professionals, such as doctors who are sued too many times become uninsurable, the demands of professional liability insurance will ensure risk reduction takes place. Meaning basically that if city officials won’t hold police accountable for their actions an insurance company on the hook for large police misconduct payouts certainly will.

 Problem officers would find their rates up until eventually they would become uninsurable, a wonderful way to have problem officers forced out of policing entirely.

 To avoid running into problems with union contracts, the strategy would allow cities to fund the base rate of the coverage, and officers funding any additional costs that would be associated with their claims history.

 In most cities, and Minneapolis in particular, it has been found that a handful of officers are responsible for the majority of complaints and lawsuits regarding police brutality.

Here is a quick rundown of how it would work:

  • Out of Control Cops: Evil.
  • Insurance Companies: Evil.
  • Insurance companies vs. Out of Control Cops: Pass the Popcorn.

Any questions?

What Emptywheel Says

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Journalist, and internet deity on privacy and national security, Marcy Wheeler explains whyshe is opposed to the latest attempt to reign in government spying, the USA Freedom Act (USAF).

Basically it comes down to the fact that neither the state security apparatus, who are operating under legal opinions that are classified, nor Barack Obama, who has kept those legal opinions from the public, can be trusted not to take an absolutely maximalist approach to any possible loopholes under any regulatory regime, and this bill is full of loopholes.  Here are her section headings:

  • No one will say how the key phone record provision of the bill will work
  •  USAF negotiates from a weak position and likely moots potentially significant court gains 
  • USAF’s effects in limiting bulk collection are overstated
  • USAF would eliminate any pushback from providers
  • USAF may have the effect of weakening existing minimization procedures
  • USAF’s transparency provisions are bullsh%$
  • Other laudable provisions — like the Advocate — will easily be undercut

Basically, any bill that is not passed over strenuous opposition from the Worst Constitutional Law Professor ever will be meaningless.

If Obama supports it, it will be an expansion of the surveillance state.

Read the whole thing.  It’s worth it.

Good Point

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It bears reading, but in the The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf makes a point about Barack Obama that I have been making since 2007:

But here’s what I find alarming: Confronted with a president who 1) spied on every American; 2) covered up torture; 3) continued a War on Drugs ruinous to minorities and whole foreign nations; 4) killed hundreds of innocents in drone strikes; 5) waged war illegally and killed an American citizen without due process (while suppressing the legal reasoning used to do so); 6) let high-ranking national-security officials break the law with impunity; and 7) persecuted whistleblowers—confronted with all of those transgressions, more than four in 10 Americans still approve of the job Obama is doing. And most of them are loyal Democrats. Partisanship and tribalism are overriding the moral compass of too many liberals, who ought to be furious with Obama. National-security policies he unilaterally pursued will be harming the U.S., its moral standing, and its most vulnerable citizens for years if not decades to come, especially since Democrats are poised to make civil illibertarian Hillary Clinton their party’s next leader.

To see it all with open eyes is to disapprove.

But for the fact that he leaves off the bit about his relentless protection of the corrupt ratf%$#s on Wall Street who destroyed our economy, he lays it out pretty well.

Read the rest.

Taibbi is Back

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Now that Matt Taibbi is no longer being gaslighted by FirstLook media, he’s back to writing about corruption in finance, and this one is a doozy.

Basically, he has found a whistle blower who taking the step of breaching her confidentiality agreement to reveal extensive and systematic fraud at J.P. Morgan Chase:

She tried to stay quiet, she really did. But after eight years of keeping a heavy secret, the day came when Alayne Fleischmann couldn’t take it anymore.

“It was like watching an old lady get mugged on the street,” she says. “I thought, ‘I can’t sit by any longer.'”

Fleischmann is a tall, thin, quick-witted securities lawyer in her late thirties, with long blond hair, pale-blue eyes and an infectious sense of humor that has survived some very tough times. She’s had to struggle to find work despite some striking skills and qualifications, a common symptom of a not-so-common condition called being a whistle-blower.

leischmann is the central witness in one of the biggest cases of white-collar crime in American history, possessing secrets that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon late last year paid $9 billion (not $13 billion as regularly reported – more on that later) to keep the public from hearing.

Back in 2006, as a deal manager at the gigantic bank, Fleischmann first witnessed, then tried to stop, what she describes as “massive criminal securities fraud” in the bank’s mortgage operations.

Thanks to a confidentiality agreement, she’s kept her mouth shut since then. “My closest family and friends don’t know what I’ve been living with,” she says. “Even my brother will only find out for the first time when he sees this interview.”

………

She was blocked at every turn: by asleep-on-the-job regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission, by a court system that allowed Chase to use its billions to bury her evidence, and, finally, by officials like outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder, the chief architect of the crazily elaborate government policy of surrender, secrecy and cover-up. “Every time I had a chance to talk, something always got in the way,” Fleischmann says.

This past year she watched as Holder’s Justice Department struck a series of historic settlement deals with Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America. The root bargain in these deals was cash for secrecy. The banks paid big fines, without trials or even judges – only secret negotiations that typically ended with the public shown nothing but vague, quasi-official papers called “statements of facts,” which were conveniently devoid of anything like actual facts.


And now, with Holder about to leave office and his Justice Department reportedly wrapping up its final settlements, the state is effectively putting the finishing touches on what will amount to a sweeping, industrywide effort to bury the facts of a whole generation of Wall Street corruption. “I could be sued into bankruptcy,” she says. “I could lose my license to practice law. I could lose everything. But if we don’t start speaking up, then this really is all we’re going to get: the biggest financial cover-up in history.”

Read the rest. 

It’s a long read, but well worth it.

The fact that all the big banks are criminal enterprises is now a surprise to anyone who reads the paper, but Taibbi’s description of Fleischmann’s experience with the so called regulators and so called authorities a searing indictment of the deeply craven and corrupt people at the Justice Department, particularly Eric “Place” Holder.

The AIG Lawsuit: Snark too Good not to Share

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First is Chris Arnade says that, “Maurice R. Greenberg, the former chairman of AIG, has that kind of fart-in-the-elevator audacity:

The senior managing director – a top-ranking banker – walked onto the crowded elevator, focus fixed on her Blackberry, pressed the elevator button and farted loudly. As the smell filled the elevator, as others nervously coughed, some covering up giggles, her focus stayed on the Blackberry. Four floors later she left, commenting to a colleague, “The elevators are vile. The janitors are always on some break.”

 Another MD turned to me: “That’s why she earns the big bucks.”

 “Being able to fart?” I asked.

 “No, you idiot. Audacity. Audacity so great that you can fart on the elevator and blame it on someone else.”

And then, of course, there is John Stewart commenting on the AIG Lawsuit:

I wish that I could write like either of them.